Introduction

Containers are well on their way to becoming strategic mainstays in modern enterprise IT environments. As customers turn to DevOps and agile development processes in support of digital transformation initiatives, and as they adopt hybrid and multi-cloud environments, the usage of containers is also rapidly growing. In fact, Evaluator Group primary research indicates that approximately 85% of IT infrastructure clients were considering or using containers in production in 2021.

With proliferation of containers at scale comes the need for automated orchestration. Customers are embracing Kubernetes as the de-facto standard container orchestration platform. While adoption has initially been driven by developers to support agile development practices, Kubernetes workloads are steadily moving into production, providing stateful environments serving business-critical workloads like Microsoft SQL. Data protection is now a requirement for Kubernetes workloads, for the purposes of business continuity, security, and compliance. This paper will explore in more detail why data protection is needed for Kubernetes environments, it will outline key approaches available in the market for protecting Kubernetes environments and data, and it will assess those approaches per common, key customer requirements.

Data Protection Considerations for Kubernetes Environments

Kubernetes environments have unique considerations compared to their physical and virtual counterparts that necessitate data protection.

Firstly, Kubernetes environments are inherently fluid, with containers being spun up and down dynamically to serve fluctuating application and workload requirements. As Kubernetes applications move into production and generate business-critical data, the data generated by these workloads needs to persist beyond the lifespan of the Kubernetes environment itself, for business continuity and compliance purposes.

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